Week 1 Thales and Philosophy
Please pick one of the following questions to answer for the forum this week:
Discuss what makes Thales’ method of knowing distinctly philosophical as opposed to mythology and religion.
Explain how Thales’ approach would be considered radical during his time, yet also simplistic.
Thales’ approach to making sense of the world would be handled by what academic field(s) of study today?
400-450 words excluding minimum of 2 references, APA style format
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Discuss what makes Thales’ method of knowing distinctly philosophical as opposed to mythology and religion.
The Thales Philosophy is based on the existence of sensory perceptions and experiences through observation. The reason this method is considered philosophical is that using this method one doesn’t have an empirical way to know if what they said is actually a fact due to it just being perceived through that individuals observations. In those ancient times most phenomenon’ was applied to deities or higher powers of some sort. Thales used new way of thinking against the grain without stating that something was caused or due to a god. Therefore, his main approach was that the world could be ascertained through natural explanations via observation (O’grady, 2017).
Mythology is way of trying to identify answers to certain questions in human life. Mythology tries to use the scientific approach towards answering certain questions for example exploring the power of myths (Campbell, 2017). Even though myths range from past experiences or historical information people seek several ways to justify certain beliefs or things they believe to be in existence. Unlike religion mythology is based on certain circumstances that may exist or not while religion stance on existence of higher power. According to Thales philosophy mythology may be indifferent as it may be challenging to use physical observations as Thales philosophy mainly induces physical observation to develop explanations to certain questions affecting humans.
Religion is believe in a higher power. The justification of religion is that we exist because of a higher power. However religion is very complex and elusive since it’s a way man tries to answer the sole reason of his or her existence. Most of people on the earth who are religious or who cherish religion are very ritualistic. In this case, we can deduct that religion involves certain rituals (Mitchell, 2017). Therefore, this may involve attending weekly masses or worship which replicates an aspect of devotion. For example Christians are devoted to going to church as the Hindus are devoted to visiting their temples. Therefore, through the Thales ideology religion can be perceived through existence of a superior being I which those engaged believe in. Perhaps in reality religion may be more than believing in a higher power as people will go through extreme ways to remain religious or believe in something.
Conclusively, this shows that Thales philosophy, mythology and religion differ. Thales philosophy bases reasoning on sensory perceptions and physical observation. Mythology is a way of using historical information to answer certain human questions whereas religion is the believe in existence of a higher power.
References
Campbell, J. (2017). Creative mythology (Vol. 4). Joseph Campbell Foundation.
Mitchell, C. (2017). Religion, identity and politics in Northern Ireland: Boundaries of belonging and belief. Routledge.
O’grady, P. F. (2017). Thales of Miletus: the beginnings of western science and philosophy. Routledge.
